"Sherlock Holmes: Ta'alumat Habalash Ben Ha'almavet" ("Sherlock Holmes: How Real Can a Legend Be") by Michael Handelzalts, Mapa Books, 170 pages, NIS 64

Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Man of the Crowd" (1840) is hailed as the precursor of the detective novel and the detective as a main character. Walter Benjamin described it as "something like the x-ray picture of a detective story." A man sits alone at a London coffee shop, reading a newspaper and watching the people go by. Evening descends on the city, the gas lamps are lit, and the city streets fill with throngs of Londoners on their way home from work. As they pass by the large bow window of the coffee shop, the narrator/protagonist observes them, first in an abstract, generalized way, and then more closely. He tries to absorb "the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance." He identifies lawyers and stockbrokers by their clothing and the way they carry themselves; clerks by their coats, boots and well-oiled hair; gamblers by the dimness of their eyes and pallor of their skin; even Jewish peddlers by their flashing hawk eyes.

Suddenly, an old, decrepit man of 65 or 70 goes by, confusing the narrator and piquing his curiosity. Intrigued by this man, he leaves the coffee chop and follows him through the streets of London. He trails him for hours. The old man never stops for a moment: He scurries from one crowded thoroughfare to the next with the sole purpose of not being alone, with the narrator always a few steps behind. They spend the entire night walking the streets. Morning comes, and the narrator still knows nothing about the man. When he finds himself back on the street of the coffee shop, the narrator gives up. "It will be in vain to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds," he concludes.

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At first glance, this is a disappointing ending for an archetypical "detective story." The detective fails in his mission and the mystery is not solved. But on closer inspection, we see that it can also be read differently. The old man's secret is not discovered, but the narrator manages to do quite a lot: In the span of a few pages, he draws a kind of social map of London, offering identifying features for a variety of social classes and professions. He also sketches a physical map of London as he roams the streets in pursuit of the old man. So does "The Man of the Crowd" really end in failure? Must the case be solved for a detective to chalk up success? Couldn't the mystery be just an excuse?

These questions resurfaced as I read Michael Handelzalts' new book on Sherlock Holmes. As the title implies, it is an attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the history of detective fiction and European literature over the last two hundred years: the secret of the success of Arthur Conan Doyle's London sleuth. Why did Sherlock Holmes become one of the most popular literary characters ever? How is it that even without reading a single one of the 56 stories and four books in which Holmes appears, just about everyone knows his name and occupation? What is it about this character and the stories written about him that makes so many people believe he is not a figment of the imagination but a real human being?

Before going any further, let us say this: The mystery, over which thousands of researchers have wracked their brains, is not resolved by Handelzalts either. Over 6,000 books and articles have been written about Holmes since the early 20th century, and no one has come up with an answer yet - which is perhaps a good thing. But like "The Man of the Crowd," Handelzalts' book is just an excuse. The author spies other things along the way, and he gives his readers an opportunity to enjoy the ride.

This may not be new to Sherlock Holmes fans, but when Arthur Conan Doyle, who mainly saw himself as a historical novelist, wrote "A Study in Scarlet" in 1886, he never imagined that the main character, private investigator Sherlock Holmes, would change his life. The manuscript was submitted to four publishers, and all of them turned it down (claiming it was too long). Only Ward, Lock & Co. was willing to publish it, and paid Doyle 25 pounds sterling for the copyright.

Book sales were not bad, although the critics were hardly enthusiastic (not much has changed since then - in the attitude of the critics toward detective novels or, happily, in the indifference of readers towards the literary taste of the critics). No one thought about a sequel with the exception of a business-savvy American publisher who approached Doyle in 1889 and offered him 100 pounds sterling to write more about Sherlock Holmes. The Scottish author produced "The Sign of Four" (1890), and began to publish short stories about the detective in the British The Strand Magazine. For his first story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," he was paid 35 pounds sterling.

Hysteria

The rest was not just history, but hysteria. The circulation of The Strand soared, and when Doyle considered killing off his character (because he thought the Holmes series was keeping him from being perceived as a "serious writer"), the magazine upped his salary to 1,000 pounds. Readers were furious with him, including his mother. "I think of slaying Holmes and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things," Doyle wrote to her. Her response was swift and unequivocal: "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!"

Doyle gave in, but not for long. At the end of 1893, he wrote "The Final Problem," in which Holmes plunges to his death in the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, locked in the arms of his arch enemy, Dr. Moriarty. The outcry that erupted was greater than he anticipated. The newspapers announced the impending death of Holmes even before the book came out. Urban legend has it that people on the streets of London donned black arm bands as a sign of mourning, although no photographic evidence is available.

Doyle was inundated by hundreds of angry letters, some demanding that Holmes be brought back to life. For nine years, he stuck to his guns, but in 1902, he relented and published his full-length novel, "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

Handelzalts' book is full of such anecdotes, and he does a good job of describing the emergence of the Holmes corpus. Like a true literary sleuth, he examines the stories and novels under a magnifying glass, tracking down changes in the detective's character and the way the plot evolves. Like a true student of Holmes, his eyes are open to minute details: Doyle's inadvertent slip-ups in chronological order, the microscopic plot inconsistencies, and the historic anecdotes that surround them (for example, the fact that the famous line attributed to Holmes - "Elementary, my dear Watson" - was not uttered by Holmes in any story written by Doyle).

In addition to this painstaking probe, there is an attempt to solve the "mystery," i.e., to offer some kind of explanation for Holmes' tremendous popularity and what made him such a figurehead in modern mythology. Handelzalts proposes an intertextual analysis of the works of Doyle. He points out how saturated the Holmes stories are with references to earlier literary detectives (Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin, the French writer Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq), but even more so to his own earlier work (in many of the stories, Holmes reads stories that Dr. Watson has written about him, and comments on them).

Handelzalts believes that this literary device of Holmes reading these stories, i.e., the very same stories that we read, is what creates the sense of him being a real, flesh and blood human being. This is a very interesting analysis, but it fails to take into account the fact that it is a literary device typical of many detective stories. In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1842), the first "official" detective story, Auguste Dupin is dismissive of the memoirs of the French police officer Vidoq. Intertexual allusions are thus less a characteristic of Holmes than a feature of the detective genre, which has tried from its earliest days to build a literary world that is both sequential, but also insular - a world where Dupin, Lecoq, Holmes, Father Brown, Arsene Lupin and Poirot conduct themselves as if they were real people. This technique of characters in a story looking back at their own history as if it were real history is one of the most intriguing and important features of the detective genre.

But as we have said, it is not solving the mystery but the journey that is important here - and in Handelzalts' book, the journey summons up some wonderful surprises: reproductions of the original Sherlock Holmes illustrations (especially those by Sidney Paget) and a Hebrew translation of "The Adventure of the Reigate Squire" by the author's grandfather, Yisrael Eliyahu Handelzalts, produced in Warsaw in the 1920s. This excellent translation is the first encounter between Hebrew and Holmes, and the whole genre of detective stories. Now that it is available to readers and literary researchers, no future discussion of this type of writing in Hebrew will be complete without it.

Dr. Watson

How can we end a review about Sherlock Holmes without mentioning Dr. Watson, his sidekick and best friend? Handelzalts devotes many pages to the relationship between the two, which began in their younger days when they shared lodgings, and went through ups and downs as Watson married, became a widower, and married a second time. Handelzalts rightly describes this friendship as one of the most interesting in the history of crime fiction. At times, I really believe it is the essence of the Holmes stories, and even their raison d'etre.

Because if it is true that the mystery is only an excuse, then we need to reread the whole series from this angle: Maybe all the mysterious murders and strange events are only an excuse for Holmes, a childless bachelor and loner, to invite Watson over. Maybe all the urgent pleas to Watson to help him investigate a particularly complicated case are spurred by the simple desire to meet with a friend who has gone off and married, and drifted away from him. Maybe, behind it all, is Holmes' fear that without some terrible murder, Watson would never have a reason to leave his wife and home, and pay his old friend a visit.

The truth of the matter is that with all his fame and celebrity status, with all the thousands of scholars researching his work, with all the millions of readers and visitors to 221b Baker Street, Holmes might never have had a guest if no crimes were committed. In that sense, he was, and remains, one of the loneliest and most melancholy characters in modern literature.

"The Man of the Crowd" could be read in the very same way: A man sitting alone in a cafe all day conjures up a mystery for himself so he won't have to spend the night alone. And that, perhaps, is another way of understanding Sherlock Holmes: a solitary man who invents mysteries to get someone to take an interest in him.